Two observations do, of course, follow. Yet again we see PWC marketing tax abuse. Second, we badly need a general anti-avoidance principle to stop this abuse.
Why do we need any more rules to stop such abuse? The laws we currently have just closed down this scheme anyway.
That the law is adequate to task is not an argument in favour of changing the law.
Was he as crappy as poacher as he is a gamekeeper?
Murphy really wants a legal system to exists that gives HMRC an unfettered discretion on what tax should be paid without any legal protection for the taxpayer.
This case he refers to shows just how little he knows about tax law – what a goon.
I am puzzled at the continuing demands for a law to look through tax structuring. We have had such a law since 1984 and the case of Furniss v Dawson. If in a given transaction there is no commercial reason for a step, the law looks through the structuring and taxes according to the overall effect.
“In any case where a predetermined series of transactions contains steps which are only there for the purpose of avoiding tax, the tax is to be calculated on the effect of the composite transaction as a whole.”
For me, even this was a step too far. Tax is such a violent, non-consensual activity that taxpayers are at least entitled to expect that the letter of the law will be observed, without all the uncertainties of looking to its supposed spirit.
That spirit is anyway mere plunder and not very hard to fathom.
“Yet again we see PWC marketing tax abuse”
Amusingly, the period in time when PWC actually prom0ted that scheme almost certainly co-incided with the period in which Ritchie boy was also promoting tax avoidance schemes.